S. Africa Orders Officers Arrested

October 30, 1995|The New York Times

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - — Government officials said on Sunday that arrest warrants had been issued for South Africa's former defense minister and 10 other high-ranking military officers in connection with the slaying of 13 people in 1987.

The charges against Gen. Magnus Malan are apparently related to a raid on the home of Victor Ntuli, an African National Congress leader, by the rival political group Inkatha. Ntuli was not home on Jan. 12, 1987, but 13 people, mostly women and children who were attending a prayer meeting, were shot dead and the home was firebombed. Three years later, Ntuli was slain by unknown gunmen.

Former President F.W. de Klerk's National Party government was secretly financing Inkatha. De Klerk, now a vice president in South Africa's multiparty government, has always denied any knowledge of the slush fund that supported Inkatha. But the charges against Malan and the others suggest that the operation reached beyond individual, low-level officers and could have serious consequences for the National Party.

Malan was given the civilian post of minister of Housing and Works in 1991 and left the government shortly afterward. The Congress demanded his resignation as a condition for negotiating a new constitution.

The arrest warrants were issued after months of work by a special team investigating charges that military and police officers conspired with Inkatha in the 1980s and 1990s.

Among the others to be arrested are Gen. Jannie Geldenhuys, former chief of the South African Defense Force, and Vice Adm. Dries Putter and Gen. Neels van Tonder, former high-ranking intelligence officers.

The issuing of the warrants seems certain to intensify tensions between Mandela and white right-wingers. In recent weeks, the rightists have demanded extensions of amnesty in connection with the violence that preceded the dismantling to the country's apartheid system. Mandela has refused.